Our aims

Celebrating our relationship with the sea

The museum celebrates and explores the overwhelming influence of the sea on history and culture; promotes an understanding of small boats and their place in people’s lives; and of the maritime heritage of Falmouth and Cornwall.

Our vision is to:

Bring the best of Cornwall to the world, and bring the best of the world to Cornwall.

We:

Curate ambitious and unexpected exhibitions

Develop partnership projects with national and international museums, bringing new connections with world cultures to Cornwall

Bring ancient artefacts from national and international collections and cultural heritage rarely seen outside of London and the UK’s other metropolitan centres

Spearhead unique collaboration between national organisations, collectors, artists and leading academics

Reach out to engage with all our communities, to include their voices, and their stories in the Maritime Museum of the Future

Have ambitions to position ourselves at the forefront of challenging preconceptions about what musuems can and should be curating and collecting. We want to create a museum of the future for the next generation of visitors

Promoting Cornwall and Falmouth to the world

Like other museums, we are committed to a special mix of conservation, research, education and entertainment. But we are more than just a museum. We aspire to be a standard bearer for the emergent Cornwall; innovative, confident, and stamped with a quality brand. Proud of its past and present, yet designed for the future. We also aim to contribute to the future of the Carrick Roads and Falmouth as a world maritime centre and successful tourist destination.

Learning

Anchoring all the displays at the museum is the notion of education, guiding visitors, schools, and teachers, on a voyage of discovery.

Museum of the future?

Our ground breaking Tattoo British Tattoo Art Revealed exhibition was only possible due to the passion and knowledge of individual collectors and the objects they have saved. Without them, all this material and the social history it represents would have been lost.

The few artefacts relating to tattooing held in museum collections only tell a partial story, one that reflects the value previous curators have placed on this art. Our view is that this profoundly limits and distorts understanding not just of tattooing but how we perceive our shared past.

This raises some challenging questions for musuems:

What should museums be collecting now?

What stories should we be telling and who for?

How do we shape the museum of the future?

The National Maritime Museum Cornwall wants to address these challenges over the coming years. We will be reaching out to engage with all our communities, to include their voices, and their stories, in the Maritime Museum of the Future.